John Andrew Rea (June 18, 1848 – February 10, 1941) was an American journalist and politician. A native of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, he was one of the eight members of Cornell University's first graduating class. As a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the New York Herald, he covered the 1877 flight of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce to Montana and their final battle with the US Army. While living in North Dakota, he covered the Battle of the Little Bighorn and drafted the constitution adopted by North Dakota when it became a state in 1889. From 1889 until his death, Rea lived in Washington state where he was the editor-in-chief of The Olympian and later president of the University of Washington Board of Regents and the first executive director of the Port of Tacoma. Biography John Andrew Rea was born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania to John Rea and Sarah Ann Robb on June 18, 1848. He studied for three years at Ohio Wesleyan University. However, when Cornell University opened in 1868, he was attracted by "its promise of liberality in education" and moved there to complete his final year, along with two fellow students at Ohio Wesleyan, Morris Buchwalter and Joseph Foraker. While at Cornell, Rea was a founding member of the Irving Literary Society and the Cornell chapter of Phi Kappa Psi, as well as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Following his graduation from Cornell in 1869, he worked as a journalist for the Philadelphia Press. For the next 30 years, journalism was to be his primary profession. In 1873, he married the former Mary Terry of Ithaca, New York, and the couple moved to Nebraska. He worked as a reporter in both Lincoln and Omaha, where among other stories, he covered the Nebraska Constitutional Convention of 1875. He later became managing editor of the Minneapolis Tribune, editor of the Bismarck Tribune and editor of the Dakota edition of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, for whom he had covered the Battle of the Little Bighorn As a correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the New York Herald, he singlehandedly covered the 1877 flight of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce to Montana and their final battle with the US Army. While Rea was living in Bismarck, he was also for a time the Register of the United States Land Office there. In 1889 he organized the